Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  From Verizon’s point of view, we sustained more damage from 7 World Trade collapsing than from the Towers’ demise. When 7 World Trade came down, it crushed a lot of underground cables. A quick survey of the damages told us it would take months and months, if not years, to rebuild—this was obviously not an acceptable time frame in an emergency situation. So we went for the quickest fix. We connected cables to the switches housed on the upper floors of 140 West Street and literally threw the cables out the windows, running them like spiderwebs over and around other buildings, stringing them along to various other points downtown and splicing them in wherever we found cables that hadn’t been destroyed.

  Over the next couple of days, Verizon employees ran cables outside the building from the 6th and 7th floors, draping them across the streets to provide local service for the disaster recovery efforts. The city, the police, and all sorts of people had lost communication—and communication, as you can probably imagine, was paramount in the aftermath of the attack.

  So we ran the cables wherever we could. They strung over the streets, ran from building to building through windows, from rooftop to rooftop. In some cases, they snaked right out the front door of our headquarters and meandered off into the city along the sidewalks.

  On Thursday afternoon, I visited the crisis center along with the senior management team, and indicated that we’d done all we could at that point. Now we needed to get into the 23rd floor of 140 West Street and grab the necessary equipment to rebuild the Stock Exchange platform.

  People had already gone into the lower floors to assess damages to the structural stability of the building, but there was still a lot going on down in that area. Smoke. Fire. Chaos. The military, the firemen, the police, and just about every government agency you can think of had set up shop, and who knew who was really in charge? We feared there were all sorts of toxins in the air. Management wanted us trained in the use of respirators and “moon suits” before we entered the building. So that’s what we did.

  I left on Friday morning with five other people. We were up in Midtown and had to take a subway as far downtown as we could, which turned out to be 14th Street. From there, we walked down to Canal. Along the way, we stopped to pick up some flashlights and tools from one of our central offices. And we decided that, if we were really going to bring these servers down from the top floors, we’d need something to protect them from the dust and dirt that was blowing through the air outside. So we picked up a bunch of garbage bags, too.

  We’d walked about a mile from the 14th Street subway stop when I was able to stop a police van and ask for a ride. The van drove us the rest of the way down to West Street and dropped us off a block from 140.

  I’d prearranged to have some of our facilities people know we were coming. When we got to 140 West Street, we found a lot of folks doing cleaning and abatement on the building. We asked eight of the cleaners to help us carry the equipment down; this way, we wouldn’t have to make multiple trips. This was early on Friday afternoon, the fourteenth.

  We donned our environmental equipment and went up to the 23rd floor with flashlights, tools, and the garbage bags. At this point, no one had been above the 10th floor; the cleaning crew had focused on the physical equipment in the central office. We were told pointblank by facilities that we weren’t allowed to go on one side of the building because, structurally, they weren’t sure it was sound. So we started up the stairs.

  We stayed in the stairwells running along the center of the building, and we didn’t stop to scrutinize any of the damage on the lower floors. Frankly, we didn’t have to; the damage was fairly obvious. There was a lot of dust on those lower floors, a lot of exposed steel beams and concrete. The ceilings were falling down, the floors were cracked wide open. Desks, cubicles, and switching equipment were strewn all over the place, as if the place had been hit with a tremendous shockwave. Simply put, there was a tremendous amount of devastation.

  We went up as slowly and carefully as possible. We didn’t have many flashlights, so we tried to stay together. On the upper floors, things didn’t look too bad, actually. It was dark and dusty, but other than that, there wasn’t much devastation. The data center was in a more controlled environment and there were several doors in place there. We had to break a window to get into one of the rooms because we didn’t have a key.

  We cut the cables that connected the servers to make them easier to get out, unscrewed them from their racks, put them into the garbage bags, and secured the bags to keep them dust-free. In all, we were carrying ten Sun servers that were the main databases; size-wise, they were each the size of a PC tower. Not a massive burden, but heavy enough. We trucked them all the way back downstairs to the lobby.

  We had a truck on standby to pick us up, but President Bush was in the city that day. As you may recall, he spoke to the crowd at Ground Zero, and he was standing right outside our building at the corner of 140 West Street when we finally walked outside.

  You know how it is when the president comes to town. They shut everything down. There’s no traffic, no movement at all. We couldn’t get our truck in for a pickup, so I made phone calls to our folks, who dealt with the police to see if we could get a police van to come pick us up. They couldn’t get through, either, so we ended up sitting there for a few hours until the president finished.

  I stood outside, waiting, listening to the president’s speech. It was an emotional moment. When he finished, he went through the crowd, shaking hands, and I happened to be standing next to the truck he was coming back to. I got to shake the president’s hand, and then Governor Pataki’s.

  We took the servers to the Pearl Street location and started the rebuild. We worked that whole weekend, coordinating with different groups all through the night, every night. To pull the data out from the servers, we had to rebuild the entire system and bring the platform up gradually. By Saturday we had it up, but to bring the network fully back online from there, one of our corporate planes had to go to Texas and retrieve some additional equipment. All this was going on while equipment from other places around the country kept arriving in the middle of the night, after which it was shuttled to different central offices who’d develop different aspects of the new network.

  I remember walking downtown to one of the NYSE offices on Sunday night, the sixteenth. I was trying to check conductivity so that NYSE could access the network management platform and could make any necessary changes before the market opened. I was there until the middle of the night trying to get that aspect up, then I went back to working with different people until dawn.

  Frankly? At 5:00 A.M. on the seventeenth, I was still wondering if we’d be able to pull it all together. Certain things were working, but we still didn’t have full conductivity.

  But in that last hour—between five and six o’clock in the morning—everything started to click. I don’t know how else to explain it; the last pieces fell into place. At six o’clock, we finally had the ability to access the network and make immediate changes. We asked the folks at NYSE to come over and sit in our Pearl Street office, so we could tackle everything on a priority basis according to what the Stock Exchange needed. And we worked right up until the point the Stock Exchange opened at 9:00 A.M. that morning.

  At 8:59 A.M., I’d been holding my breath all night. I think one of our executives described the situation as “a diving catch in the bottom of the ninth.” The opening bell sounded at the Exchange and everything … everything went pretty flawlessly. Obviously, certain firms weren’t fully operational and scrambling to have their people work at different facilities, since their regular offices weren’t up and running. But the network worked. It held under what turned out to be a record day for trading volume.

  Chairman Grasso from the Stock Exchange was very happy. We got a tremendous amount of recognition from the government and the Stock Exchange, and from all the member firms who were elated we’d been able to pull off the job.

  I can only describe the teamwork within
Verizon as incredible—everyone, all the different groups, focused on getting things done. People started working hard the moment we got over the initial shock of the attacks on Tuesday the eleventh. I can’t tell you how many hundreds—maybe thousands—of people within Verizon never went home from the eleventh till a week later. They lived in their offices. They slept on floors and sofas. They got an hour’s sleep here, an hour’s sleep there. They just kept doing what they had to do. Some went out and got new underwear and shirts when they had to, but they didn’t go home.

  You know, one of the first things you think about when something traumatic happens is the desire to be with your family. We all wanted to be there, with our loved ones. But these people stuck it out. They’re very emotional about their jobs. And there was never any feeling that we wouldn’t get it done. Everyone knew we would. Frankly, everyone knew that we had to.

  The prevailing attitude was this: “The president of the United States wants this to happen. The governor, the mayor, and the president of the Stock Exchange want this to happen. Getting the markets up and running is critical to our country. We have to show the terrorists that they can’t stop us, they can’t keep us down.”

  I get choked up thinking about it. The dedication, the commitment, the teamwork within Verizon and all the other businesses that assisted us. It was an incredible, incredible effort. I’ve never seen anything like it. And yes, without question, I am very, very proud of the contribution we made.

  CHRISTOPHER CASS

  Christopher Cass, forty-three, grew up in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island and says he was a Yankees fan from the day he was born. He lived in Manhattan for many years before moving to Los Angeles.

  I’D PURCHASED a ticket weeks before it all happened, to fly from L.A. to New York on September 13 on the red-eye flight. Well, the eleventh happened. My sister, Nancy, was in the World Trade Center, on the 44th floor of Tower 1. Air travel across America shut down for three or four days, and my flight was canceled.

  I called the airlines and was unable to get through, but I live close to a hotel in Beverly Hills that had a satellite office for United Airlines. So I walked in, took a number, and waited in line. It was a big crowd and everybody was asking the same question. “I was supposed to be on a flight—what’s happening? When can I get outta here?”

  Finally, I met with the travel agent and she switched my flight to Monday night, the seventeenth.

  LAX is a messy airport—it’s self-contained, with all the terminals in this large horseshoe. Because of 9/11, authorities were saying, “Get here early for your flight. Two hours minimum for domestic, three hours for international.” For the first time, they actually meant it. I had a 10:00 P.M. flight, so I made sure to get there well before 8:00.

  Unfortunately, security wasn’t allowing anyone to drive into LAX, not even to drop off or pick up passengers. Authorities were telling everyone to park in, like, Parking Lot Z, which was nowhere near LAX; it was, like, somewhere out in Long Beach. So my wife drove me out there, and I joined this amazingly long line of people with luggage queuing up to get on shuttle buses that would take us to the terminals. I could tell then that I was in for a strange evening.

  On the shuttle bus, I threw all my luggage onto the racks. Passengers were packed in like sardines. The driver got on the microphone with that insanely pleasant voice saying, “Terminal One,” and a few people got off.

  “Terminal Two.” A few more people got off.

  “Terminal Three.” One or two people got off.

  Then: “Terminal Four,” which is the international flight terminal. Everybody got off the shuttle! It was mass exodus, except for me and one other guy. Everybody who got off at Terminal Four looked foreign to me, and I got the distinct impression that they were eager as hell to get out of America.

  Fast-forward a bit. At the United terminal, I checked in, went up to the counter, handed over my ticket and my passport. I asked the woman if there was any way I could get a window seat. She tapped her keyboard, glanced at her screen, and said, “Everything’s all booked up, but ask the attendant at the gate. There’ll probably be cancelations. We might be able to fit you in.”

  That day, I was concerned with security—obviously. So while I was at the counter, I asked the woman specifically, “Look, I’ve got this laptop I’m gonna carry on. Is that okay? Should I put it in my bags?”

  She said, “No, don’t worry about it.” And I thought, fine, fine. I left the United counter and headed toward the security checkpoint.

  The queue for the metal detector was long and slow. Everyone was going through one security checkpoint—there was only one conveyor belt for luggage, one metal detector, one set of guards. I started to fidget; I could sense that everyone was getting antsy. There was an Arab-looking man in line, and it was impossible not to notice him under the circumstances. And this woman with a baby stroller turned to me and decided at that moment to say, for whatever reason, in a voice loud enough to carry four or five people forward, “I’m going to Baltimore and I hope that guy’s not on my flight!”

  She made no bones about it. She didn’t even try to clean up her tone. Didn’t whisper it under her breath. It was like, “To hell with being PC, this is how I feel, so this is what I’m saying.”

  I ignored her and pretended I was distracted with my own thoughts, doing the half-polite, gee-I’d-rather-not-talk-to-you-right-now sort of airport body language. I didn’t know how to deal with her and I didn’t want to. What she said made me sad. Ugh! The Ugly American!

  At the security checkpoint, I threw my laptop, backpack, and fanny pack up on the belt. I usually carry a little Swiss army knife on my key chain, but I’d already taken that off because I’d heard that nothing even vaguely sharp would be allowed on board. Not wanting to get hassled over a two-inch pocket knife, I’d packed the knife in my luggage.

  I noticed that every item going through the X-ray machine got stopped. The guys working the belt would back it up, examine whatever they saw through their X-ray screen, then run it through again. This happened with everybody’s stuff: forwards, backwards, forwards again. I’d never seen so many security people at an airport checkpoint, by the way. There were U.S. marshals in blue windbreakers with yellow, bold lettering on the back. LAPD officers. L.A. airport transit cops. National guardsmen. The works. We’d entered a police state.

  My laptop went through, and I was prepared to deal with some questions. The sir-could-you-step-over-here, turn-your-computer-on-please deal. My case held the computer, lots of phone cord for the modem, an extra battery for my cell phone, and a tiny travel alarm clock, plus a couple of camera lenses and film canisters—what I supposed would look like the makings of a small bomb through an X-ray machine.

  But the security guys slipped my computer case through the machine once. Twice. The attendant nodded to me, I grabbed the case, and was on my way. I took about three steps past all these men wearing uniforms and guns, and I thought, are we really any safer than we were a week ago?

  I was struck with this insane urge to just call one of these armed guards and say, “Look! I just breezed on through here and nobody checked anything. What the hell is going on?”

  By that point it was nine o’clock, and I walked up to the gate counter because I wanted to get that window seat. This woman, whom I’ll call United Employee Number One, took my boarding pass and typed my name into her computer. I told her how I’d prefer the window, and she said, “We’re gonna start boarding in about twenty-five minutes. Why don’t you come back and I’ll see what I can do for you then? I’ll hold on to your boarding pass in the meantime.”

  Twenty-five minutes later, I went back to the gate and United Employee Number One was nowhere to be seen. In her place stood United Employee Number Two, so I approached her and explained how Number One had my boarding pass, how I wanted a window seat, and blah blah blah blah. Number Two said, “We’re not boarding just yet. She’ll be back. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

  Off I went to
find a chair and sit down amidst this crowd of people who were all … watching everyone else. Everyone in the waiting area was sizing each other up. Who are you? Why are you flying on this flight? My flight? This sense of vigilance permeated everything. We’d been in shock all week, and I think we all felt a little paranoid.

  I did notice at that point that there were two or three Arab-looking guys. And I noticed that I noticed them, you know? I thought, God, now I’m like that woman with the stroller. But I just couldn’t help it. I noticed them and I felt bad for it. But I noticed just the same.

  Then this announcement came over the speakers. “Sorry, we’re experiencing a slight delay. The pilot is having a staff meeting with the crew. There are five flight attendants on this flight. Three have checked in, and two are still going through the security checkpoint. They’re on the way up, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

  I thought, that’s the most information I’ve ever heard an airline disclose about a flight delay ever.

  When the two flight attendants came rushing down the concourse, it certainly felt like a validation. Aha! They were telling the truth. It’s a nice feeling when an airline tells the truth.

  Now the passengers began lining up at the gate, and I went back up to the counter. As it turned out, United Employees Number One and Two were gone, and I was faced with Number Three, an older woman with a nicer uniform and a bright-red scarf; she appeared to be some sort of senior United official. And I struck up a conversation with her about, “I gave my boarding pass to a woman who used to be here, she told me not to worry. I was trying to get a window seat.”